In the POD market, a great number of pages are printed by a great number of copies in most cases. In addition, various print styles are provided in the market such as printing for a large-capacity stacker, and finishing-conscious printing with stapling/saddle-stitch binding/case work binding or the like for each copy.
In general, printed materials cannot be taken out from a stacker until the printing job for the stacker is completed. In the case of stapling/saddle-stitch binding/case work binding, it is configured to bind sheets for each copy and the printed materials cannot be checked until the process is completed in order to prevent incorrect collating (incorrect ordering of the pages) and pages missing (redundancy or missing of pages). For the purpose of preventing them, most image forming apparatuses 10 are generally configured not to allow users to take out the printed material in the process of printing.
In addition, the image forming apparatuses 10 are configured to always keep providing consistent printing with various calibration functions.
Even with any sophisticated automatic correcting functions provided for the devices, users are quite likely to confirm the printed materials by themselves because they assume responsibility for the finished printed materials instead of assuming responsibility for the devices. That is to say, since the users are greatly concerned about consistency of color reproduction in the case of large amount of printing, they want to keep observing the printing state in succession so as to have printed materials with a high degree of perfection. To meet the demand, the image forming apparatus 10 with a function called “confirmation printing” have been proposed.
The “confirmation printing” is a function of printing two copies for the next page and outputting one of the copies to a stacker and the other one of the copies to a paper output tray in response to a user pressing a confirmation printing button at any time during the printing of the job. When paper sheets are fed in advance, two copies are printed for the page for which paper sheets are to be fed next.
That is, the “confirmation printing” is a function of intentionally printing an extra sheet for a page and outputting the sheet to a destination different from that of ordinary printing in addition to executing the ordinary printing so as to meet a user's demand for confirmation.
The “confirmation printing” function includes confirmation printing for each page and confirmation printing for each copy.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-72299 discusses a technique for specifying a page for which confirmation printing is to be executed from the pages for main printing included in the job, and setting the number of copies for the specified page is to be output in the image forming apparatus 10.
Since the “confirmation printing” function has complicated sequence control, however, it is implemented in some intelligent devices instead of being provided by any devices. That poses a problem in that a device without the confirmation printing function cannot execute the confirmation printing.
When the confirmation printing is set in an image forming apparatus, the settings for the confirmation printing is provided for the apparatus. That poses a problem in that users are bothered to perform an operation of changing the settings for the confirmation printing each time a job is completed in order to realize the confirmation printing with different settings for each of the jobs when multiple jobs are printed.